Social Media at CSRF

The use of social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook, can add an additional dimension to a conference, allowing important messages to be broadly disseminated and encouraging those not physically in attendance to still interact with the conference events. The purpose of this page is to provide resources to CSRF members on how to use Social Media effectively and responsibly within an academic and professional setting. To the right, you can see the most recent tweets from CSRF!

Twitter 101

It's difficult to engage with forms of social media if they are completely baffling to the mind as to what they are or why they exist! This is how many people feel about Twitter! The terminology surrounding Twitter may not be intuitive at first - what on Earth is a Tweet? Why would someone want to tweet? What does it mean if people are 'following' someone? The links provided below will help to answer some of these questions, but in short, Twitter is a social media platform that allows for the rapid exchange of small pieces of current information.

You can think of a "tweet" as a blog posting, except that a Tweet is limited to 140 characters - so being concise is an absolute necessity. It is precisely this conciseness that makes Twitter so successful - it provides millions of pieces of information in small, instantly digestible bursts - or - tweets. In the context of an academic conference, often times audience members will "tweet" (verb) during someone's presentation in order to share ongoing updates of the most interesting findings from a talk. This is referred to as "live tweeting" - similar to "live broadcasting." Live Tweeting at a conference can allow others who are not physically present to follow along with the content being presented - albeit in an abbreviated fashion. Some people tweet as a means of reminding themselves about talks that they'd like to look into further at a later point in time. Others tweet because they know that their followers will be interested in learning more about the research being presented at a particular conference.

You may find that if others tweet about your talks, soon you'll be meeting new people who share similar research interests! For example, if you're giving a presentation on your latest and greatest research and audience members 'live tweet' during your talk, you might find that the next day you have some new messages in your inbox from potential research collaborators, students, mentors or journalists. However, if you yourself are not on Twitter, it will make it much more difficult for people to 'track you down.' In sum, Twitter (and tweeting) is just another means of getting your work out there and open for discussion. Of course, there may be times when the work you are presenting at a conference is not ready to be shared widely with the world. In this case, it is important that you let people know that you would like them to refrain from tweeting (i.e., publicly sharing) anything about your talk. It is equally important, as an academic community, that we agree to respect the wishes of those who ask us not to tweet about their presentations or specific portions of their presentations. One simple way to achieve this is for all presenters at CSRF conferences to indicate on their first slide whether or not their talk is "tweetable," and if so, provide their twitter handle or possible hashtag reference. Likewise, if a talk should not be tweeted, the first slide or introduction is the time to make this statement.

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Glossary of Terms:

Twitter: A social media platform that provides the venue in which people can share 'tweets' or very short bursts of information. www.Twitter.com

Tweet (noun): A tweet is a piece of information shared on Twitter. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, so it is important to be precise. Tweets can include other pieces of information, such as a link or a photo (or both), or they can be stand alone pieces of information. Ex: 98% of elves prefer chocolate over peanut butter according to new study http://linktoelfstudy.com

Tweet (verb): Ex: Joe is going to tweet tonight's talk on sexual satisfaction. Or: Joe is the best at tweeting live talks.

Live Tweeting: Live tweeting refers to the process of sending out instantaneous tweets during the course of some kind of event, such as a conference. Usually this involves sending more than one tweet in rather rapid succession on a similar topic. In the example of a conference symposium, you might post 1-3 tweets per talk.

Twitter Handle: This refers to your username or account name on Twitter. Twitter account names start with the @ sign and do not have any spaces. For example, CSRF's Twitter handle is @_CSRF. Tweets shown on Twitter that are made by CSRF will appear like this:

Every Twitter user gets to choose a handle (@_CSRF) that will never change, as well as a display name. The display name can change. You can see above that for CSRF, it simply says CSRF. At some point in the future, it could be changed to Canadian Sex Research Forum or any other written phrase, but the @_CSRF portion will never change. There is also an image next to the tweet, which is similar to a profile picture. This can also change at any time.

Following: It might sound like stalking, but it isn't. To follow someone on twitter, you simply click a button that says "Follow." When you follow someone, their tweets will show up in your own twitter feed, or news feed. In other words, when you log on to twitter, you will see the most recent posts from all of the different Twitter accounts that you follow. Following people can be a great way to gain followers for your own account, as many people will "follow back" in a reciprocal fashion. However, if you follow too many people, you'll find that your newsfeed gets overrun with tweets that you might not care about. It is best to only follow the accounts that provide information you are interested in seeing. You can always unfollow someone at any time if you find their tweets annoying, useless or otherwise disinteresting.

Followers: Twitter counts the number of followers that each account has, as well as how many people each account follows. A follower is therefore someone who follows a twitter account. The more followers an account has, the greater number of people that account's tweets will be shown to. So if you have 1000 followers, it means that every time you tweet, your tweet will be posted to the news feeds of each of those 1000 followers. However, because Twitter operates in real time, with many thousands or perhaps millions of tweets being issued every second, just because someone follows you, doesn't guarantee that they will see your tweet. Most people will only see the tweets that take place at or near the time that they are looking at their twitter account.

Re-Tweet: A re-tweet is similar to an email forward. If someone else has tweeted something that you find particularly interesting and you think your followers might also find it of interest, you can "re-tweet" (verb) it. By clicking the "re-tweet" button, you'll be sharing that tweet with all of your own followers. In your own news-feed, you'll also see tweets that have been re-tweeted by others that you follow. This explains why sometimes you'll see tweets in your newsfeed from people that you do not personally follow. A retweet in your newsfeed will look like this:

The "CSRF retweeted" line at the top indicates that the account that you follow (@_CSRF) 're-tweeted' a tweet by Jocelyn Wentland (@JocelynWentland). Even if you do not personally follow Jocelyn, you'll see this tweet because it was re-tweeted by @_CSRF. If you wanted to re-tweet a tweet, you would press the button with the two arrows going around to make a circular or square image.

Favourite / Liking: If you see a tweet that you particularly like, but you don't necessarily want to re-tweet it to everyone following you, you can "save it for later" or mark it as a favourite by clicking the "heart" button that shows up below each tweet. In the example above, you can see that Jocelyn's tweet has been "favourtied" 3 times by other twitter users. Note: favouriting / liking used to be indicated by a star. It is now indicated by a heart, more in line with the "liking" option on Facebook and other Social Media sites. The tweet below from @Kristen_Mark while attending the 2015 SSSS conference (#SSSS2015) shows the updated symbol for "liking" or "favouriting" someone's tweet.

Reply: The first arrow that you see beneath a tweet is the "reply" button. If you click this button, you can write a response to the tweet in question. Responding to a tweet is similar to engaging in a public discussion. Often, when you reply to a tweet, others will then continue to apply and a conversation will ensue. If you wanted to reply to a tweet, you would hit the reply button and then you would see a box like the one below:

In this example, we have a tweet by Justin Lehmiller (@JustinLehmiller). He has posted a statement as well as a link that elaborates on what his tweet has said (in this case, Justin is linking to a blog that he has written about the topic of women's dissatisfaction with the size and shape of their breasts). You can see from the information below that the tweet has been "re-tweeted" by others 2 times, and 2 people have "favourited" the tweets. The boxes to the right of these statistics indicate the profiles of the people who have either re-tweeted or favourited the post. In the pink area (which will change colour based on your own personalized colour choices for twitter), we see the reply box. Typing in this box will allow you to reply to Justin's Tweet. A reply is still just as public as any other tweet and will still be available to be seen by others, but will also remain "connected" to the original tweet as a reply, so that people can go back and see the process of a conversation.

Hashtag: What you used to think of as the pound sign (#) on your touchtone phone is now referred to as a social media hashtag. A hashtag is a word or phrase that is preceded by the pound sign (#) and used to identify messages on a specific topic. Hashtag phrases do not include spaces, so a hashtag for this page on how to use twitter might be #Twitter101ForCSRF. When used in the context of social media (e.g., Twitter or Facebook), a hashtag becomes a clickable link or searchable concept. If you click on a hashtag phrase, it will take you to a list of all other social media postings that have included that same hashtag. Hashtags can be useful for tweeting at conferences. For example, if you look up the hashtag #CSRF2014 you will find the majority of tweets that were sent out during the 2014 CSRF Annual Meeting in Kingston, Ontario (a selection of these are shown in the image below). To see the tweets from the 2015 meeting you'd look for #CSRF2015. Adding a useful hashtag to your tweets can make sure that people interested in the topic you are talking about can easily find your tweets, even if they are not one of your followers (yet!).

Do you have a question about Twitter or other uses of Social Media that you would like us to address here on this page? Submit your question below and we will add it to a Social Media FAQ Section!